Writing
Tagged “distributions”
6 articles
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All the Linux (maybe)
How many Linux distributions are there? Hundreds, but they come in a handful of families. A guided tour of the ones worth knowing in mid-2024, family by family, from Debian and Fedora to Arch, NixOS and the Android…
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Gentoo Linux
Gentoo compiles everything from source, optimized for your machine, and for a few years in the early 2000s it was the coolest distribution around. It never became mainstream, and its culture is a cautionary tale about…
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The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
The first Linux distributions appeared in 1992 because installing Linux by hand was brutal. A few are still with us more than thirty years later, a few changed everything and vanished, and a few are footnotes. The…
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OPINION: Do We Really Need Another Linux Distribution?
There are hundreds of Linux distributions, and someone is starting another one right now. Do we need it? Probably not. Should they do it anyway? Probably yes. What all that choice really costs, what it's given us, and…
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Beginner’s Guide to Selecting a Linux Desktop Distribution
Choosing a first Linux distribution feels like it matters enormously and mostly doesn't. The four questions that actually decide it, the handful of distributions worth starting with in mid-2024, and how to try one this…
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What is Linux?
Linux is a kernel, an operating system, a license and a habit, depending on who's asking. A plain explanation of what it is, the parts that make up a distribution, where it already runs in your life, and how to pick…